This Week’s Top Stories from Harvard Health

Top 5 ways to reduce crippling hand pain

Hand pain is more than just annoying. The stiffness and swelling that go along with hand pain can sap strength and diminish the ability to carry out routine functions, like buttoning clothes. Here are six methods to help manage hand pain, retain hand function, and avoid surgery.

Get your copy of Healthy Hands

Beneath the skin, your hands are an intricate architecture of tendons, joints, ligaments, nerves, and bones. Each of these structures is vulnerable to damage from illness or injury. If your hands hurt, even simple tasks can become a painful ordeal. Healthy Hands: Strategies for strong, pain-free hands describes the causes and treatments for many conditions that can cause hand pain. It also features information on hand exercises, as well as handy tools and other gadgets that take strain off your hands.

What causes shaky hands?

Q. I've started to notice a slight shakiness in my writing hand. Is this just normal aging or should I get my shaky hands checked out?

A. If the shakiness is sudden or recent, you should talk to a doctor. It may be nothing serious — for example, just a reversible side effect from a medication or from too much caffeine. The most common form of hand shakiness is known as essential tremor.

Additional News from Harvard Health Publishing

Supplemental nutrition drinks: help or hype?

“Prehabilitation” may improve heart surgery recovery

Detecting afib with a smartphone camera?

Featured Courses

HMX Online Courses from Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School’s HMX online courses cover fundamental medical topics and their clinical applications, with interactive lessons appropriate for a variety of learners and backgrounds. Each course is led by Harvard Medical School faculty and features detailed graphics and animations, true-to-life scenarios, and doctor-patient interactions recorded in Harvard hospitals and clinics.

The next course period begins January 8, 2019 (applications due by December 4), with courses in physiology, immunology, genetics, biochemistry, and pharmacology. Tuition is $800 for a 10-week course.

Learn more

Healthy Hands

Featured content:

•	The healthy hand
•	Arthritis of the hand
•	Special bonus section: Advances in artificial joints for the hand
•	Tendon trouble
•	Exercise for the hand
•	... and more!